Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Faculty Voices with Ron Koertge

I was talking to a young poet
recently who refuses to write in forms of any kind, even as an exercise or—God
help me—for fun. He (and it is a he) can write a pretty readable poem—using a
long and very loose line. Which is fine. I do that more often than not.

But I also know the drawbacks of
that technique—a tendency toward the prolix and an inclination to value momentum
over a technical mastery that’s so well done it’s pretty much invisible.

His (we’re back to the guy again)
argument against traditional forms is that meter and/or rhyme are inhibiting. He doesn’t want to have to force his ideas
into an inappropriate container, since “that’s too much like shoving a boa
constrictor in a milk bottle.”

Let’s take a minute to look at his simile:
his ideas are the boa constrictor and the sonnet is the milk bottle? Boa
constrictors strangle things, pal. Is that what you want your ideas to do?

“Well, no, and maybe that isn’t the
best figure of speech.”

No kidding. But we pressed on. I suggested
we take a look at the sestina form: six
stanzas, six lines in each stanza. No meter, no rhyme. Just the same six words
to use as end-of-line words in every stanza but in a different order. I showed
him a gorgeous sestina by Elizabeth Bishop and here, for the record, is stanza
#1:

September
rain falls on the house.

In the failing
light, the old grandmother

sits in the
kitchen with the child

beside the
Little Marvel Stove,

reading the
jokes from the almanac,

laughing and
talking to hide her tears.

Now I know one
stanza doesn’t do justice to a whole poem in the same way that the engine
doesn’t do justice to the entire Lexus, but—and let’s just caress this simile
for a second—the first stanza of any sestina is engine-like since the key words
are there, the tone is there, the main character/characters are there, and so
on. In short, the first stanza propels the rest of the poem.

So he said he’d
give the sestina a try and I suggested taking one of his very long and very
loose (so loose as to be baggy) poems.

I don’t think
what happened will surprise anyone: 1. He couldn’t do it. 2. But what he saw in the process was this: his
original poem was far too relaxed and unbound, and merely working in a form
that demanded restraint showed him that. The next draft of his original poem
was much stronger, thanks to the sestina-exercise.

I’m not a
Formalist at all, but I’ve done this exercise a hundred times: turning a poem
that just wasn’t cooperating into a sonnet or a villanelle or a
series-of-couplets. Why not, right? I had nothing to lose and something to
gain, and that something was working with the medium in a new way.